Inside the stack: How Kraken is expanding beyond the exchange
How Payward is building distinct products for trading, investing, and everyday money on both fiat and crypto rails
Debbie Soon
|Aug 19, 2026
Inside the Stack is a new content series by Privy that breaks down how companies are using onchain infrastructure alongside traditional financial rails to build new financial products and experiences.
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For more than a decade, Kraken has been synonymous with crypto trading. Its parent company, Payward, has since built a much broader set of consumer financial products.
That expansion is taking shape across three distinct experiences:
Kraken Pro is built for sophisticated traders, with advanced tools for executing complex trading strategies across crypto and other assets.
Kraken, its flagship consumer exchange, makes it easy to buy, invest, and grow assets.
Last but not least, Krak is designed around everyday money: sending, spending, and growing cash and crypto.
Rather than asking one product to serve every financial need, Payward is building purpose-built experiences for different audiences and different ways of using money across its portfolio.
Increasingly, the infrastructure underneath those experiences spans both onchain and traditional financial rails.
From trading crypto to putting it to work
The Kraken consumer exchange has evolved well beyond simply buying and selling crypto. Users can invest across crypto and stocks, automate investments, and put their assets to work.
Earlier this year, Kraken took that further with DeFi Earn, which gives users access to onchain yield without requiring them to manage the complexity typically associated with DeFi. Users can deposit stablecoins and earn yield generated through established onchain lending markets. In June, Kraken expanded DeFi Earn with a Bitcoin vault, bringing the experience to another asset users already hold. Across its four vaults, DeFi Earn has surpassed $400 million in deposits.
Behind the experience are four Veda vaults curated by institutional-grade risk manager Sentora, with assets held in Privy-powered non-custodial wallets. Users can deposit assets, select a risk profile, and access strategies across established DeFi protocols, while Privy securely handles wallet infrastructure and onchain execution behind the scenes.
The result is broader access to onchain markets through an experience that already feels familiar. Rather than asking users to navigate protocols, wallets, and individual transactions themselves, Kraken brings these opportunities directly into its existing interface.
From holding money to spending it
Krak extends that idea into everyday financial activity. Launched by Payward in 2025, Krak is a consumer money app designed around three simple actions: send, spend, and grow. Users can hold and move both cash and crypto, earn on balances, and send money to other users.
The Krak Card, which has already reached nearly 125,000 cards issued across the UK and EEA, launched in the US this August.
Customers can spend from more than 600 currencies and assets, including dollars, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptoassets, anywhere Visa is accepted. Customers can also choose the order in which balances are used, and can even fund a single purchase from multiple assets, which are converted into US dollars in real time at checkout.
Krak Card also offers up to 2% cashback, paid directly in US dollars or Bitcoin once a transaction settles. In the US, the Krak Card is issued by Lead Bank and powered by Stripe Issuing, connecting a multi-asset financial product to the card networks consumers already use every day.
One product experience, multiple financial rails
DeFi Earn and Krak Card may look like very different products, but underneath, they illustrate the same broader shift.
Crypto and stablecoins give financial products new capabilities: money can move globally, access onchain markets, earn programmatically, and still connect back to the payment networks people use every day. Increasingly, all these are starting to live together in the same product experience.
Payward’s expanding consumer suite demonstrates that users don’t need to choose between a crypto experience and a traditional financial one. They can trade, invest, grow, send, and spend across different assets, while the product handles the underlying rails.
When crypto becomes infrastructure rather than the product itself, financial applications can combine new onchain capabilities with the reach and familiarity of existing financial networks.
Stripe’s stablecoin stack brings those building blocks together, from programmable wallets with Privy and stablecoin orchestration with Bridge to payments and card issuing with Stripe.
If you’re designing a financial product around crypto and stablecoins, get in touch to explore what you can build with Privy and the rest of Stripe's stablecoin stack.